March 13, 2004

BAGS OF HATE

The Federal Opposition has pounced on community hatred of plastic bags, agreeing to ban them as it beefs up its environmental credentials before the election later this year ...

Australia has been struggling for some time with its 6.9-billion-bag-a-year habit.

That’s how much the community hates plastic bags. Imagine how many we’d use if we liked them.

Posted by Tim Blair at March 13, 2004 12:37 AM

Comments

Completely OT (except that it does involve plastic), Mickey Kaus makes mention today at Slate of "the completely trivial story of Bush picking up an uncooked display turkey..."

CAN'T ANYONE SEE? An uncooked turkey is a pale pinkish-yellow. It is not normally displayed because it's about as appetizing looking as Grandma's inner thigh. The turkey Bush is holding is plainly COOKED. It could, theoretically, be an artful plastic replica, though that's not an excuse in this case for anyone who parrots the plastic turkey line and thus demonstrates that their reading is limited to other lefty sites parroting the plastic turkey line. WE know that it was not a plastic turkey. But for crying out loud, the one thing any photo instantly tells you it was NOT, is an UNCOOKED turkey.

Those plastic bags would have to be replaced by something, say, 6.9 billion paper bags per year. In any complex system, you can't change just one thing.

Of course, we could use those canvas bags like they give away on fund-raising telethons. The thinking here seems to be, "If I can carry my organic groceries to my Volvo in a reusable canvas bag, then everybody ought to. Plastic bags today, compulsory tofu tomorrow!"

Mike, I think what they do is use torches to cook the exterior to the desired look. The interior is large. It's done, I believe, at every military Thanksgiving dinner. It's done at large banquets and buffets.

Like a lot of people I use shopping bags twice; as shopping bags then as garbage bags.
Now I'll be forced to buy garbage bags, which are much thicker; therefore for a given volume of garbage I'll be throwing out a far higher amount of plastic.

Like Motley, we use the biodegradeable bags we get with the shopping as garbage bags. They then go to landfill and presumably degrade along with the rest of the garbage. In the future we will have to buy garbage bags, and either use paper (from those virgin forests protected by shower-virgin hippies) or use cotton bags and make multiple trips to the supermarket in the car to get the groceries. And what of the small bags that vegetables, fruit and meat are packed in? Are they out too? Knee-jerking without regard to the actual consequences.

Oh yeah. Every time I go down the street, they're there...all around me. Under my feet, blowing in the sky, clogging the gutters, blocking the drains...They're everywhere.

Enough of the sarcasm. I can't recall the last time I saw a single itinerant plastic shopping bag choking a dingo or some stupid marsupial rat or whatever other ecological catastrophe these things are supposed to be causing. Maybe they are abundant in the world's oceans, but is anybody buying that wealthy Westerners put them there? More likely the less than fastidious waste handling of the third world is to blame, but hey...we can't blame (or tax) them, can we?

The reason, of course, for this hysteria is that the bags used to cart groceries and thence to contain and constrain garbage are a symbol. A symbol of our decadent consumerism, and an affront to the unhygienic tree huggers who swing just enough votes to prompt people like Carr into making bold statements.

No doubt, a big, fat, juicy tax will be the solution - dedicated, of course, to sound environmental initiatives.

The big question is: What's next? A 25 cent tax on each tampon? What about 50 cents for each of those whale killing incontinence nappies used by those infernal senior citizens who continue to defile Mother Gaia long beyond their fair innings?

Slowly, very slowly, people are going to wake up to just how dangerous the utopian visions of Green National Socialist Party really are.